Sarah recognized her instantly, and while she paused in mingled amazement and anger, the child looked up and saw her. In a twinkling she relinquished her grip of the boy's hair—jumped up and sped back into the dirty alley, with the blind haste of guilty fear.
Yes! Mr. Hunt was a wise man, who knew the world, and trebly sage in her generation was his spouse. If their daughter had never acknowledged this before, she did now, in her disgust and dismay at this utter overthrow of her dreams of the virtuous simplicity to be found in lowly homes, where riches and fashions were things unknown.
CHAPTER III.
Summer had come to the country with its bloom and its beauty, its harvests and its holidays. In town, its fever heat drew noisome smells from overcharged sewers, and the black, oily paste to which the shower that should have been refreshing had changed the dust of crowded thoroughfares. Cleaner pavements, in the higher portions of the city, burned through shoe-soles; glass radiated heat to polished stone, and stone radiated, in its turn, to brick, that waited until the evening to throw off its surplus caloric in hot, suffocating waves that made yet more oppressive the close nights. The gay procession of fashionable humming birds had commenced their migrations, steamboats and excursion craft multiplied at the wharves, and the iron steed put forth all his tremendous might to bear onward the long train of self-exiled travelers.
The Hunts, too, must leave town; Lucy must, at all events, have a full season, and a brilliant one, if possible, for it was her second summer, and much might depend upon it. Her mother would accompany her, of course; and equally of course her father could not; that is, he must return after escorting them to Saratoga, and spend the remainder of the warm months at home. His business would not allow him to take an extended vacation. The boys were easily disposed of, being boarded every summer at the farmhouse of an early friend of Mr. Hunt, where they were acceptable inmates, their clothes as well cared for as they were at home, and their morals more diligently cultivated. The younger girls caused that excellent manager, their mother, more perplexity. This was not the first time she had repented her indiscretion in allowing Sarah to "come out" before her elder sister had "gone off." But "Sarah was so tall and so womanly in her appearance that it looked queer, and would set people to talking if I kept her back," she was accustomed to excuse her impolitic move to her friends. This summer she realized, as she had not done before, the inconvenience of having two full-fledged young ladies upon the carpet at once. Lucy's elegant and varied wardrobe, and the certain expenses in prospect for her and her chaperon at Spa, seaside, and en route, left a balance in hand of the sum allotted for the season's expenditure that was startling in its meagerness. Mrs. Hunt was a capital financier, a peerless economist, but the exigency taxed her resources to the utmost.
One morning she arose with a lightened heart and a smoother brow. "I've settled it!" she exclaimed to her husband, shaking him from his matutinal doze.
The "Eureka!" of the Syracusan mathematician was not more lofty in its exultation. Forthwith she unfolded to him her scheme. She was a native of New Jersey, "the Jarseys" she had heard it called in her father's house—had probably thus denominated the gallant little state herself in her girlhood. In and around the pretty, quiet village of Shrewsbury there were still resident scores of her relatives whose very names she had sedulously forgotten. One alone she could not, in conscience or in nature, dismiss to such oblivion. This was her elder and only sister, long married to a respectable and worthy farmer, and living within a mile of "the old place," where both sisters had drawn the first breath of life. Twice since Mrs. Hunt had lived in the city had this kind friend been summoned on account of the dangerous illness of the former, and her presence and nursing had restored peace, order, and health to the household. The earlier of these occasions was that of the second child's birth, and in the softened mood of her convalescence Mrs. Hunt had bestowed upon the babe her sister's name—Sarah Benson—a homely appellative she had ofttimes regretted since. At distant and irregular intervals, one, two, three years, Mr. or Mrs. Benson visited their connections in "York;" but the intercourse grew more difficult and broken as time rolled on and the distance widened between the plain country folk and their rising relations. Then, again, death had been busy in the farmhouse; coffin after coffin, of varying lengths, but all short, was lifted over the threshold and laid away in the village graveyard, until but one was left to the parents of the seven little ones that had been given to them, and to that one nature had denied the gifts of speech and hearing. Grief and the infirmities of approaching old age disinclined the worthy pair to stir from home, and their ambitious sister was too busy in building up a "set" of her own, and paving the way for her daughters' distinction, to hide her light for ever so short a period in so obscure a corner as her former home.
Aunt Sarah, however, could not forget her nurseling. Every few months there arrived some simple token of affectionate remembrance to "the child" she had not seen since she wore short frocks and pinafores. The reception of a basket of fruit, thus despatched, was the suggestive power to Mrs. Hunt's present plan. She had made up her mind, so she informed her husband straightway, to write that very day—yes! that very forenoon, to "Sister Benson," and inquire whether she would board Sarah and Jeannie for a couple of months.
"I don't s'pose she will let me pay board for them, but she will be pleased to have 'em as long as they like to stay. It's never been exactly convenient for me to let any of the children go there for so many years, and it's so fur off. But dear me! sometimes I feel real bad about seeing so little of my only sister!"—a heavy sigh. "And there'll be the expenses of two saved, out and out, for they won't need a great variety of clothes in that out-of-the-way place."